widening posts and page in general

Can anyone help me figure out how to widen my posts and my page in general; it has too much of a vertical shape to it. Please, I need someone who can explain this in detail. I don't understand the acronyms and terminology used by many in the other posts on this topic. My current theme is the Ocean Mist. Hopefully if I widen it, the page will still be viewable by all the different browsers out there as well. If I can figure out how to widen my page with CSS, I'll buy the upgrade from WordPress.com, and implement the changes.

If you have CSS editing experience, you can get the paid custom CSS upgrade and renew it annually. It will allow you to stylize the appearance of themes you find here > Appearance > Themes, but it does not allow you to change the functionality, by editing the underlying template. Also note that CSS is theme specific, so you cannot use the CSS stylesheets from other themes with the themes here at wordpress.COM.

Since there is no official support for the CSS upgrade, I recommend that you don’t buy the upgrade unless you have at least moderate understanding of HTML and CSS because you must be prepared to do the work on your own. Expecting either Volunteers of Staff to provide CSS lessons on this forum or to do the work for you is unrealistic. You will find links to tutorials and resources here http://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-css/

If you do purchase the CSS editing upgrade, this post contains important informationhttp://csswiz.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/if-you-have-the-wp-com-css-upgrade/

I'm unclear about what you mean when you refer to "stylize the appearance" and "change the functionality". The tutorials and resources about custom CSS have proven unhelpful to me so far. I don't expect anyone to do the work for me, but I'm hoping that someone will help me instead of just push me away and say get the programming experience somewhere else.
This is a forum for CSS Customization, isn't it?
Howell

It sounds like I am in a bit over my head in trying to edit the fixed-width theme of Ocean Mist. From what thesacredpath was saying on a link Google directed me towards, the better option for me might be to choose a different theme to work with.

@Howell
FWIW TSP is Co-Admin on my blog and I did know what his advice re: fixed width was from reading the forum threads previously. I wanted to point out this fixed-width theme reality to you in as logical way as I could without influencing your decision. Best wishes with your blog. :)

Howell, if you're still checking this thread, I'd like to say I did the CSS upgrade and managed to change a lot of items on my blog like color and font (although width wasn't one of them) without knowing one thing about programming. What I did was find a site that gave some of the basic vocabulary, then load up the code on the page where you can edit it, and change one item at a time, each time using the preview feature to see what happened. It took a while but I did manage to make it work the way I wanted it to. People say 'don't depend on the forum' but when I got stuck, I came to the forum and each time they helped me, as long as I made the effort to communicate carefully what I was trying to do and showed good faith in looking for an answer first in existing threads. Your responses to the jargon used in this thread (they can't help it, they forget how it sounds to people who haven't got a single clue what even 'theme' means!) was persistent and I don't doubt you could do it.

By the way, I went and looked at your blog and I actually like it the width it is now. It's already very dense with information and if it were wider it could be overpowering. Just sayin.' It looks like a very nice blog.

I wonder what they mean when they put things like @Howard. Back at 'cha?

The White Lily Blog, thanks for the compliment on my blog. I will keep its design as is, and I appreciate your perspective on the width in relation to the dense information. If there was a way to easily experiment with changing the widths and columns, I'd probably try it, but as for now, i'm happy. Thank You!